Blog Tour: Pursued by Death – Gunnar Staalesen, translated by Don Bartlett

When Varg Veum reads the newspaper headline ’YOUNG MAN MISSING’, he realises he’s seen the youth just a few days earlier – at a crossroads in the countryside, with his two friends. It turns out that the three were on their way to a demonstration against a commercial fish-farming facility in the tiny village of Solvik, north of Bergen.

Varg heads to Solvik, initially out of curiosity, but when he chances upon a dead body in the sea, he’s pulled into a dark and complex web of secrets, feuds and jealousies. Is the body he’s found connected to the death of a journalist who was digging into the fish farm’s operations two years earlier? And does either incident have something to do with the competition between the two powerful families that dominate Solvik’s salmon-farming industry? Or are the deaths the actions of the ‘Village Beast’ – the brutal small-town justice meted out by rural communities in this part of the world.

Shocking, timely and full of breathtaking twists and turns, Pursued by Death reaffirms Gunnar Staalesen as one of the world’s greatest crime writers.

One of the fathers of Nordic Noir, Gunnar Staalesen was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1947. He made his debut at the age of twenty-two with Seasons of Innocence and in 1977 he published the first book in the Varg Veum series. He is the author of over twenty titles, which have been published in twenty-four countries and sold over four million copies. Twelve film adaptations of his Varg Veum crime novels have appeared since 2007, starring the popular Norwegian actor Trond Espen Seim. Staalesen has won three Golden Pistols (including the Prize of Honour). Where Roses Never Die won the 2017 Petrona Award for Nordic Crime Fiction, and Big Sister was shortlisted for the award in 2019. He lives with his wife in Bergen.

My thoughts: Varg does manage to find quite a few dead bodies in this book, and annoy quite a few police officers too, as he pokes around a small town, ostensibly looking into the death of a writer two years before, but also the disappearance of a young man a few weeks ago. The missing student’s mother happens to have been the dead man’s partner, and she hires Varg to look into what was ruled an accident at the time.

Even after being warned off by the police multiple times, he can’t seem to leave the current investigation alone. He just can’t help himself, and he’s annoying even more people as he goes. I don’t think he’ll be holidaying in Solvik any time soon.

He’s digging around the local, somewhat controversial, fish farm, there seems to be a link there, but after a bomb goes off at a meeting, he focuses on the locals a little more – the police have got their man, or so they think.

Varg is an interesting character, he’s a natural loner but people are either drawn to him or find him so impossibly irritating. He’s incredibly good at what he does, but never seems to build connections in useful ways (annoying every police officer he meets doesn’t help) and seems to find trouble at every turn, but I really enjoy reading about him. The stories are always so clever and compelling, full of sudden twists.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.